As Wrangell is working to enter a new age of economic development, long-held concerns over the town’s building policies are resurfacing.

During discussions about the Alder Top (Keishangita.’aan) subdivision at the Sept. 8 borough assembly meeting, Assembly Member Dave Powell raised concerns over lax building codes and lack of enforcement.

Wrangell has a history of building outside of established property lines and ignoring property zoning laws, like keeping boats and derelict vehicles in parcels zoned for single-family homes, according to Borough Manager Mason Villarma. Now, as the town attempts to draw in new development, Powell said it’s time for stricter building codes to protect those who would inherit the town in the future.

“I’ve been on the assembly for 10 years, and we’ve discussed this for 10 years,” Powell said to the assembly. “I want this taken care of, and if we have to, I want all construction in this town to be halted, unless we see a plan.”

The assembly said it wasn’t going to stop construction, but Powell’s concern opened the floor to a discussion on deficiencies in the municipal building code. 

“Historically, absolutely, there’s been no oversight,” Villarma said at the meeting. “We don’t have a code compliance officer that’s going around town every week seeing what new properties are being developed and such. We just don’t.”

As Powell said, these issues are not new. In fact, the assembly attempted to address it in 2021 by drafting a new code during a work session, according to the conversation at the Sept. 8 meeting. 

The session extended past midnight, but was never completed due to concerns over what exceptions needed to be made to protect residents from overly rigid building requirements that can be expensive and hard to satisfy in an isolated rural community.

“I was the one that proposed that,” Assembly Member Bob Dalrymple said on tabling the building code until the exceptions could be worked out. 

He said the proposed code required a permit to have an engineer or architect’s stamp, so if you wanted to build a small garden shed you would still have to pay a lot of money to an out-of-town business to legally build. “You’re taking out the ability of anyone here to do their own work.”

The push and pull between regulations and personal freedoms is practically built into the Alaska experience. “Here in the state of Alaska, even more so than probably the Lower 48, people want the autonomy to develop their properties how they want to,” Villarma said in a Sept. 24 interview.

The Universal Building Code was adopted in Wrangell in 1952 following a massive fire that took out half of the business district, according to Sentinel articles from the time. In 1955, the Sentinel reported that residents found the new code to be too constricting and considered it to be delaying development in town after the fire.

Although the current building code has been updated since, it could hardly be called modern, having been adapted from the 1997 Universal Building Code, with some tailoring to fit local needs. Commercial contractors, however, must adhere to 2021 building codes on newbuilds, according to Villarma, but that does not help with issues faced by old buildings that have not been required to be updated. 

“Like the Marine Bar, for example, that was an old commercial building from the ‘50s. It was grandfathered in, so it didn’t have a sprinkler system,” Villarma said in the interview.

He acknowledged that another concern is how to deal with properties that are in violation of building codes without creating a civil penalty backlog for people who have inherited those properties. 

The next steps for the building code will be an assembly work session Nov. 10, where members will review the code and assess the exceptions that paused the process in 2021.

Villarma said this will be followed by a first read of a proposed ordinance at a later date, then by a robust public comment period so adjustments can be made before it is adopted.

Because they can pick up where they left off, he said that he was reasonably confident that the new code could be adopted by Christmas.

Villarma said that, once adopted, an effective date would be set far into the future to give residents plenty of notice ahead of time. It would also give the borough time to educate the public and acquire necessary resources like identifying who would be responsible for those inspections.

“This isn’t something we’re doing to raise the cost of development for folks,” Villarma said, “It’s something to protect future generations of Wrangellites and those that will inherit property or develop property in the future.”